[Leica] al gore and photography

[kcassidy at asc.upenn.edu (Kyle Cassidy)]

all this talk about al gore reminded me that the first time i met sal 
dimarco was at an al gore rally in 2000. it was the day he'd announced joe 
lieberman as his running mate. i was there because i'd happened to be 
standing in a room with a congressperson about three hours before when an 
aide came in with a bunch of tickets. in any event, i had 200mm f 2.8 and my 
domke vest. i squeezed into about the 76th row of what was literally an 
airplane hanger at a point where a person would almost fill up the view 
finder in a horizontal composition. not the best place on earth to be 
standing, but there wasn't a whole lot i could do about it.

i was in place about 12 minutes when someone grabbed me by the vest and 
barked "hey! you know the rules! no press up here!" i tried to explain that 
i wasn't press, but the guy tugged me out of the crowd, handed me over to a 
very small woman in a blue suit and said "get this one back to the press 
riser." so she lead me back to a riser, about sixty feet further back, 
filled with offical looking news guys with 600mm lenses on expensive 
tripods. they all looked at my 200 like i was some sort of crazed imposter, 
except for this one guy at the very edge who yelled "kyle! kyle cassidy!" -- 
it was sal dimarco. i'd never met him, but he recognized me from the lug. he 
shared his taped off spot on the riser with me (it said TIME MAGAZINE, which 
i thought was very cool). i took some photos of a miniature joe biden giving 
what was really a great lecture about economics off the top of his head 
while we waited hours for gore. sal had a cannon 300 2.8 mounted on a leica 
R8.  finally gore showes up, and sal snaggs the woman in the blue suit and 
points to me and says "he needs to go up front". so she lead me to this 
roped off area in front of the stage, i photographed the whole thing with a 
28mm lens from three feet away.

al gore's wife, before she decided to devote her life to ridding the world 
of the evil that was Twisted Sister, was a photojournalist. i have one of 
her books, it's not bad. and al was, for a time, a member of the fourth 
estate himself.

i didn't get a single good photo of him that day though. in every shot i 
have he looks like a raving madman with terrible teeth.

bill clinton, on the other hand, you can't take a bad photo of that guy. he 
never blinks.

that's my story, and i'm sticking to it.